As millions of financial and non-financial transactions are received or created at a financial institution, such transactions often traverse through a number of computer systems for processing, each of which may process individual transactions according to specific purposes as dictated by the institution, the customers, and various other entities. A transaction may be received by one particular financial institution's computer system, verified by another for authenticity, and processed by yet others for various financial and systematic purposes. Indeed, each transaction may be read, processed, and transformed into different formats by a plurality of systems, of a financial institution, multiple times during its lifespan. In such workflows, with numerous systems transforming, modifying or deleting transactional data, errors can-and often do-occur. Even subtle or minor changes within a transaction can ultimately have substantial client impact and cause unforeseeable and catastrophic results.
When the legacy systems of a financial institution are upgraded or replaced by newer and more modern systems, the functionality of the systems must be maintained and negative client impact must be minimized. In order to ensure proper operations, one method utilized in the industry has been to verify that the outputs of these new systems at each step of a workflow (i.e., the transactions outputted at each system), are accurate by ensuring that the outputs are consistent with the outputs of the legacy systems they are replacing. Yet, the only known and utilized manners of verifying the integrity of these transactions are through methods that are largely manual in nature. An analyst may manually check that each field of a transaction has not been erroneously modified as it traverses from one system to next. Alternatively, an analyst may copy text of transactions to text documents and utilize text-compare software to determine differences in the text.
With millions of transactions processed by each system of a financial institution, the currently utilized manual methods of verifying the proper operations of the transactions is inefficient, to say the least. Furthermore, each individual system of a financial institution may receive and process a number of distinct data files and file types over a number of different channels. When this is combined with the large number of possible errors and error types that may occur at each system, including those that may be unique only to a particular computer system or a version of the system, proper and efficient verification of system operations through manual means is made even more difficult, if not impossible.
Accordingly, a solution is needed to efficiently and accurately verify the integrity of the transactions as they are processed by various systems of a financial institution. Such solutions would be invaluable in verifying the proper operations of new or upgraded systems of financial institutions as well as the proper operations of existing systems along a workflow.